


Goddess in the Water

by Redrikki



Series: Xander and Eshu's Wacky Road Trip [2]
Category: African Diasporic Mythology, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Dubious Consent, Gen, Humor, Monsters, Mystery, Non-Graphic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-17
Updated: 2013-06-18
Packaged: 2017-12-15 05:56:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/846085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Redrikki/pseuds/Redrikki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Xander and Eshu find romance, a mystery and car trouble on the road, just not necessarily in that order.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In which a flat tire leads to a mystery

**Mid- August 2003  
On the road, 50 Kilometers South-Southwest of Abomey**

“Hanging with the god of travelers, you’d think this wouldn’t happen,” commented Xander from the bottom of the muddy ditch where he was crouched by the car. The left front tire had blown and the man was studying it mournfully.

Eshu stood on the road above the ditch and tried to shield his cigarette from the unseasonable and pouring rain. “You’d think,” he responded dryly.

Xander’s head swung up and he shot the Orisha an one-eyed glare. “This is what I get for hiring a trickster,” he muttered angrily.

“A trickster?!” Frankly, Eshu was insulted. That was nearly as bad as all those ignorant missionaries who had assumed he was a demon. “Anansi is a trickster,” he tartly informed the man. “I am the usher of destiny, the teacher of hard lessons, the speaker of all tongues and-”

“Red hot sex god, yeah, I get it,” interrupted Xander rising from his crouch. “Look, are you going to help, or you just gonna stand there and talk about yourself?”

Eshu gave up on his sodden cigarette and dropped it, disgusted, into the mud. “Help with what, English? The jack will just sink if you try to raise the car to change the tire, and there’s no way we can get it back on the road by ourselves anyway,” he pointed out.

Xander sighed and ran his hand through his wet hair. “Yeah, you’re right. Plus, it’s getting late and car repair in the dark? Always fun.” He sighed again. “Now we just get to spend the night in the car. Dibs on the back.”

“Or we can just hike a half a mile up the road to the village.”

“Yeah,” he agreed with a sigh. “That works too.”

*****

Except for Xander’s initial comment of “Guess it’s a good thing Willow mojoed my bags water-proof,” they were silent as they slogged down the muddy road into the village. Xander was working to keep his footing under the shifting weights of the laptop and overnight bag. Eshu used his staff to keep his footing and concentrated on figuring out just what it was that seemed off about the place. He had not seen a statue of himself, or even himself as Legba, in the crossroads at the outskirts of the town, and, as they entered it, he could not sense the presence of either shrines or offerings to himself or any other Orisha. Eshu had never been to a place in this country so utterly devoid of belief in him. It was more than a little unsettling.

In most other respects the village was fairly typical. Forty or so mud houses capped with corrugated iron roofs formed a sort of rough square with a small lagoon and fields of cassava and cotton ranged out behind them. There was what looked like a blacksmith’s shop with a beat-up truck parked next to it and Eshu absently wondered how much the smith would charge when he hauled out Xander’s car. At the far end of the square was wood-frame little church with a small rectory attached. There was no one in the streets, no congregation of old men drinking and dispensing wisdom in front of some house, and no herd of small children making a nuisance of themselves before their mothers called them in for dinner. In the driving rain and dwindling sunlight the village looked eerie and singularly uninviting, but a light shone from a rectory window. Eshu shrugged and headed towards it.

“Wait,” said Xander, catching the Orisha’s arm. “We’re going to a church? You’re going to a church?”

“Why not?” Eshu asked. “Jesus was a decent sort,” he continued and shook off Xander’s hand. “Besides, English, these Catholic missionary types are famous for their hospitality. They think it helps convert heathens like us.”

“Speak for yourself, heathen,” Xander said with a grin, “I’m Episcopalian. Technically, we’re heretics.”

Eshu knocked on the door with his answering grin still on his face, although it faded to an appreciative smile at the woman who opened it. She must have been quite the beauty in her youth and late middle age hadn’t done much to dampen her looks; it just gave her crows feet and turn her hair to the color of iron. She looked surprised to see them there, but, thankfully, not alarmed or upset.

“Who is it, Marie?” demanded a man in very French sounding French. A moment later, an elderly white man in a priest’s collar joined her in the doorway to stare at Xander’s drowned pirate look and the ruined and dripping feather in Eshu’s hat.

“Bonjour, um hi!” Xander said with an awkward little wave of his hand and the tiniest of flinches. “Ah, Je, ah, I mean, mon nam est Xander and, um, ah-”

“My name is Hermes and this is Xander,” Eshu began in French, cutting off Xander’s pathetic attempt at communication. “We’ve had some car trouble and were wondering if you know of some place we could spend the night.”

“I am Father Michel,” the man introduced himself in the same language and stepped forward to shake Eshu’s hand. “You’re both welcome to stay the night assuming my housekeeper doesn’t mind.”

“Of course not!” The lovely Marie responded. “Now certainly isn’t a good time for young men to be wandering out of doors.” Father Michel fixed her with an almost basilisk-like glare. “In the rain,” she added sounding unaccountably flustered. “I’ll go add to the stew,” she announced and fled.

“Er, what?” Xander apparently hadn’t followed.

“We have a place to stay.”

*****

“This is quite some rain,” Eshu commented over dinner in, of course, French. “I’ve never seen it like this in a dry season. Has it been raining straight through?”

The priest and his housekeeper both shook their heads. “No,” said Father Michel. “There was a week or so in July with no rain at all, and then it just started up again, stronger than ever, and hasn’t stopped. It has become quite a problem.”

“Hurray for global warming. It’s not just for alarmists anymore,” murmured Xander in English under his breath. Eshu was surprised; he wouldn’t have credited the man with enough French to follow along.

“What was that?” asked Father Michel sharply in French.

“I, um, Je dicere, no wait, that’s Latin,” began Xander. “Je, um-”

“He was just saying it sounds like global warning,” interrupted Eshu with a translation.

“That’s silly,” snorted Marie. “The problem is rain not warmth. Frankly, the rain has been the least of our worries what with Robert and the others disappearing.”

“Disparu?” asked Xander.

“It means disappear,” Eshu offered helpfully.

“I know what it means,” snapped Xander before looking suddenly sheepish. “Sorry,” he apologized, looking down at his dinner plate. “I just wanted to know if she meant like Jimmy Hoffa disappeared or ran off with Betty-Lou disappeared.”

Eshu blinked at the man for a moment trying to turn the sentence into something that made sense.

“What did he say?” Marie demanded a translation.

“As far as I can tell, he wanted to know how they disappeared,” explained Father Michel earning a sharp look from Xander. “They drowned,” he informed Xander, still in French, but in the slow and exaggerated tones people used for the deaf or stupid. Based on Xander’s look of blank and slack-jawed incomprehension, the good Father probably wasn’t far off the mark. “They went swimming and they died,” the priest clarified without resorting to English.

“Ah,” said Xander as a look of comprehension finally dawned across his face. Then, abruptly, he frowned. “The bodies,” he began in his fragmented French, “why disappear?”

Marie shook her head. “We never found them, just piles of clothes on the banks. In fact,” she added in conspiratorial tones as she leaned over her bowl offering Eshu an excellent view of her cleavage, “in the village they are saying that-”

“They sank,” interrupted the priest sounding almost angry. “Bodies do that and sometimes it rains.” He paused and gave each of them a look that signified the end of this line of questioning. Then he smiled and asked Eshu where he had gotten his hat. From there the conversation drifted to the results of recent National Assembly elections, the proposed hydroelectric plant and other such topics. Like Eshu, the old priest seemed to have an opinion about everything and Marie was good for the occasional bon mot. Xander, on the other hand, remained silent throughout the rest of the meal and, while he smiled and made appropriately appreciative noises when asked if he enjoyed the food, he mostly stared into some inner landscape with a slight frown on his face.


	2. In which Eshu pumps someone for information

Dinner was done, the priest was using the facilities, and Eshu sat at the table with Xander and appreciatively eyed the smooth rolling of Marie’s flesh beneath the fabric of her dress as she cleared the dishes.

“So,” Eshu whispered to his companion, “what do you think?” he asked, gesturing toward the woman with his cigarette. 

“Yeah,” Xander nodded, “there is definitely something Hellmouth-y going on. My spidey sense is tingling.”

Eshu sighed. No wonder the man’s French was unintelligible; English was his first language and he was barely comprehensible in that. “So, you think there is something strange happening?” Eshu hazarded to translate.

Xander nodded again. “Yeah, with all the denial flying around and the drowned guy disappearing acts, it’s almost like being home. Well, except for the French and the freaky rain of doom.” He paused, frowning. “Why? What were you talking about?”

“I was actually talking about Marie.”

“Oh,” the man said looking somewhat confused. He paused for a moment as if to think and then shrugged. “She seems nice I guess,” he finally concluded, although he sounded a bit unsure. “I bet she knows more about what’s going on then she’s saying though,” he added sounding almost excited. “I just wish we could talk to her without the priest doing his Scully thing.”

“Well,” Eshu paused to offer Marie a seductive smile as she took his empty bowl, “I was planning on having sex with her when she’s done clearing the table, so I suppose I could ask then.” A look of pure horror crawled across Xander’s face. “All right, English, now what?” snapped Eshu. 

“She’s ancient,” was the agonized response.

“No,” corrected the Orisha, “I am ancient. She is barely middle aged. Besides,” he added snuffing out his cigarette, “older women tend to be a good deal more experienced.”

“Right,” Xander sarcastically replied. “So what will I be doing while you benefit from her years of experience?”

“Keeping him distracted,” Eshu whispered nodding to the returning Father Michel. “Who knows?” he added. “He may even lower himself to speaking English for you.” He nodded politely to the priest as he sat down then quickly excused himself to pursue Marie. He headed first towards the latrine as a round about way to the kitchen, and behind him he heard Xander fumble the opening lines of what promised to be an awkward conversation. 

******

After his extended romp with Marie, Eshu headed to the small room he and Xander had been set up in earlier. The light was on and Xander was stretched out stomach down on his pallet fiddling with his surprisingly dry laptop computer. Eshu leaned up against the door jam and light a cigarette. “So,” he asked, “how did your talk with the Father go?”

Xander shrugged and dragged himself into a sitting position. “About what you’d expect.”

Eshu pushed away from the door and shook his head. “You really need to learn French, English,” he said as he sat down.

“I don’t see what’s so great about it,” the American groused. “French is just Latin badly pronounced.”

“That may be true,” Eshu grunted, struggling to remove a damp and oddly shrunken tennis shoe, “but it still the only language everyone knows around here. “Well,” he added after a moment of consideration, “everyone who isn’t you.”

“Universal languages are good,” his companion conceded. “I totally support the idea. I just don’t get why the lingua franca has to actually be, you know, Franca.” 

“French.”

“Yeah, that,” Xander dismissed the correction. “So,” he asked leaning forward, his voice suddenly eager, “you find anything out?”

Eshu nodded. “A new and interesting use for dish soap,” he answered with a grin.

Xander snorted. “Experience, huh?” A dreamy sort of half smile grew on his lips. “I wonder if it was the same one that Ahn and I...” His voice and smile withered away to nothing and for a moment he looked lost and strangely hollow. He shook his head as if to clear it and started again. “So, weirdness. What’s the what?”

“Well,” Eshu began, snagging a convenient ashtray and leaning back on the pallet, “according to Marie the consensus in the village is that they drowned, but there are some that think they may have had a bit of help.” 

“You mean like foul play?” Xander asked. Eshu raised an eyebrow. “Ok, that was a bit Sherlock Holmes I’ll admit, but it was either that or jinkies.”

Eshu opted to ignore that entire exchange. “The story going around is that something in the lagoon is seducing and killing men.”

“What? Like a Kleptes-Virgo?”

Eshu snuffed out his cigarette and took a moment mentally sort through what Marie had said. “No,” he answered after a moment. “She said they were young, your age or younger, but they were all married, and, Robert, the oldest, had a son.”

“‘Kay, scratch that idea.” Xander jumped up abruptly and attempted a brief bit of pacing in their too small quarters. “Wait,” he said, coming to a halt. “Why seducing? Why not, say, snatching?”

“Ah,” said Eshu sitting up. “The fish that got away. Interestingly enough, he actually is a virgin.”

“So our demon seduces some guy and then just lets him go?” The man asked incredulously. He sat back down. “That’s just weird,” he added with a shake of his head. 

“Supposedly she managed to talk him into the water up to his waist, but then she kissed him and...” 

“She didn’t like the flavor?” Xander remarked dryly. “Did Marie say what this guy said she looked like?”

Eshu nodded. “Well, it was dark, she only works at night apparently, but according to our witness she was very beautiful with long hair, coffee-and-cream skin, weird eyes and -” he made a cupping gesture on his chest.

“Huge tracts of land,” offered Xander.

Eshu blinked at him for a moment. “I was actually trying to indicate that the killer was rather buxom,” he said in the slow wary tones he normally reserved for lunatics. “Besides, English, she’s a water demon, most of them are physically incapable of coming on land.”

Xander sighed and shook his head. “My cultural reference jokes are just going to keep on going right over your head.” He sighed again. “It’s almost like hanging with Giles, except he’d at least get the Python reference.” 

“Yes, well,” said Eshu determinately plowing through Xander’s nonsense, “there is something about her that is bothering me.”

“You mean other than the killing people?” asked Xander. “Plus the whole virgin thief moves without actually liking virgins. I wonder if she is a succubus except they’re usually in dreams and over a long period of time and –” Xander broke off when he noticed that Eshu was staring. Eshu continued to gaze at the increasingly uncomfortable young man and wondered, not for the first time, just what sort of person he was traveling with. 

After a few long moments Eshu explained his concern. “She sounds like Mami Wata.”

“Mami who?” Eshu was almost relived that the man didn’t recognize the Orisha’s name.

“She’s a fellow god,” Eshu explained. “A goddess of rivers and such. She’s a long haired, light-skinned beauty who appreciated men of experience, but killing them, well, it is not her style.”

“Ok,” Xander said with a nod, “so, she enjoys the company of mortals as much as the next horny god, she just doesn’t off them.” 

“Normally she gives them money.” 

“So this Mami Wata chick is like the tooth fairy, only with sex,” mused Xander. “Are we sure it’s not her?”

“Positive,” Eshu confirmed. “I can sense no other gods here but me.” He tried to keep his bitterness out of his voice. It seemed wrong to him that Father Michel’s Jesus should drive out all other gods. If it was Mami Wata it would serve the village right. 

“Well,” said Xander pulling himself up straight, “this seems like a job for Book Guy, or, since he’s not here,” he reached over and grabbed his laptop, “Internet Man.” 

Eshu watched the man as he fiddled set up the blackberry and connected to the internet. It started up at a snails pace, but the Orisha boosted the signal with a wave of his hand. He wasn’t the god of communication for nothing. “Is there really any information about demons on-line?” he asked.

“Yup,” Xander answered. “There’s this great site we discovered a while back. www.demonsdemonsdemons.com. Guess what that’s about.” 

There were nearly five minutes of silence as Xander searched for a likely suspect and Eshu puffed on his cigarette and read over the human’s shoulder. “Anything?” he inquired when the silence grew protracted and boring. 

“Na, everyone seems to prefer new to used.” Xander sighed and logged on to his e-mail. “I’m gonna ask Giles and see if he can come up with anything. Hey, he wrote me!” He sounded inordinately enthused about this, but his face slowly fell as he read the letter.

“Well, what does it say?”

“Oh, the usual,” he answered in a too bright voice. “How’ve you been? Haven’t heard from you in a while. Are you sure you were ready, ‘cause, in retrospect, maybe sending you to Africa on your own right now wasn’t...” There was more than a hint of an edge to his voice as he trailed off. He took a deep breath and continued in a falsely cheerful voice. “Oh, hey, Willow and Kennedy found two. Guess that’s why she’s too busy to write.”

Eshu didn’t know who these people were or what Xander’s problem was, but it was almost painful to watch. He snuffed out his cigarette and severed the blackberry’s connection to the internet. “Turn out the lights, English. Marie tired me out.”


	3. In which Xander puts a screwdriver to good use

They stood on the muddy road a few hours after the dawn that had barely penetrated the clouds, and looked down at the car. The rear end still rested up on the slope of the ditch, but the front end had sunk up to the rims in the small swamp at the bottom.

“Well,” Eshu said matter-of-factly, “there is no way the two of us are getting that out.”

“Yeah,” Xander agreed glumly, running his hand through his wet hair. “And it doesn’t look like Triple-A’s gonna come along with a tow truck any time soon.”

Eshu sighed and wished the rain would let up enough so he could light a cigarette. At this rate, they were going to be stuck in this damp and wretched little town for a while. There wasn’t a scrap of belief for kilometers around and the wet had thoroughly ruined his hat. At least it was warm enough that the rain didn’t carry a chill.

“Father Michel said that today they’d build something to hold the water back,” Xander announced, seemingly apropos of nothing.

“They might need it if the rain doesn’t stop,” Eshu commented laconically, wondering where this was going. 

“Why doesn’t she do something?” Xander suddenly burst out leaving Eshu to wrap his mind around this latest abrupt conversational shift.

“Why doesn’t who do something about what?” he asked.

“Your friend, that Mami Wata chick,” the man clarified. “I mean, here we’ve got someone using her looks, stealing her nookie, and soiling her good name. You’d think she’d be, you know, making with the smiting, getting her wrath on.”

Eshu considered the situation. “Maybe she already is,” he said holding his hand, palm up, to the falling rain.

“You think she’s making it rain? “ Xander asked incredulously. “Wow,” he snarked, “Now that’s real effective. What? Figure she was just fresh out of lightning bolts?”

The man clearly did not understand the limitations of godhood. “She’s a water and fertility goddess, English, she has no lightening bolts,” the Orisha explained. “Be glad it is merely rain and not, say, cholera or impotence.”

They stood in silence for a moment as Eshu let that sink in. He wondered briefly why the man hadn’t demanded that he do something. Not that he would. No one in this town paid him any homage, he owned them nothing, and Eshu made a point of never doing any work he was not obligated to do. “Did you ever talk to your friend?” he asked. Xander was not the only one who could be random.

The man shook his head, looking glum. “I used to be good at it. It was, like, my thing. A talking thing. Now, here I am and I can’t even talk to my friends when we speak the same language.”

Eshu rolled his eyes and gave a snort. “On the other hand, you seem to have mastered the art of self pity. I hear it is an important life skill.”

For a moment Xander glared at him, his single eye flashing with a temper Eshu would never have credited him with, but then his shoulders sagged and his head hung down. All morning the man had been as annoyingly moody as a pregnant woman, but now, standing there in the rain with his hair in his face and his shoulders slumped, Xander looked like a one eyed puppy that had been both kicked and drowned. Eshu, without quite knowing how, found himself throwing his arm about his companion’s shoulder and flashing him a big smile. “Do you know what you need, English?”

“To stop being such a girl and get over myself,” Xander hazarded a guess. 

“Well, that too,” conceded Eshu, “but I was actually referring to sex. Even that demon woman knows that it the best way to truly connect.” He slipped his arm off the man’s shoulder and gave him a friendly slap on the back. “We will find you a pretty girl and, if you do it right, you will not even need to talk.”

Xander blinked blankly at him for a few seconds before favoring the mangrove trees on the far side of the ditch with his thousand-yard stare. After a moment, a slow smile bloomed across Xander’s face. “You know,” he said with a little laugh, “you’re actually right. And I know just the one.” With that, he jumped into the ditch.

“What are you doing?”

“Well,” explained Xander, opening the car’s trunk, “it’s a while ‘til sunset, so I figured I’d kill some time doing something else I’m good at.” He pushed aside a jumble of weapons and pulled out a toolbox. “Come on, let’s go do something useful.”

*****

Xander’s idea of being useful involved helping the villagers construct their levee. Since Eshu found that to be both boring and excessively strenuous, he made himself useful by translating Xander’s surprisingly competent construction advice and waving his staff in the face of anyone who dared to suggest that a cripple do any actual manual labor. By the time the rain-obscured sun was approaching to horizon and the wives began collecting their husbands for dinner, they had managed to construct a sort of zig-zagging retaining wall at the top of the slope that divided the main cotton field from the lagoon. It was not quite finished, but Xander’s know-how and battery-powered drill had helped to make the process fairly smooth if wet and muddy.

As the rest of the workers drifted home across the field towards home and supper, Father Michel and Fabrice, the village headman and owner of the blacksmith’s shop, made their way over to where Xander was attempting to dry off and re-pack his tools. Xander rose at their approach and Eshu edged closer in case they needed him to translate. 

“We would like to thank you,” announced the Father in flawless, if slightly accented, English. He reached out to shake Xander’s hand. “You are all right for an American.”

“Moi?” asked Xander with a smile. “I am just too inexpensive to pay you fix car,” he joked in his broken French. All three of the men laughed, although not necessarily for the same reasons, and the smith shook his hand before turning to head for home. “Seriously though,” Xander continued, this time in English. “He’s not gonna charge me, right?”

Father Michel smiled enigmatically and suggested the three of them return to the rectory for dinner but Xander shook his head. “I’ve got to pack up these tools and I was thinking of going for a quick swim to get the mud off.”

The priest eyed him suspiciously. “Be careful,” he instructed the younger man. “It is dangerous to swim alone at night.” 

“No problem,” Xander assured him a little too casually. “Hermes will be with me.” Father Michel’s eyes darted towards Eshu as though he had just remembered the Orisha was there “Plus,” Xander added, “with all my swim team experience, I’m practically part fish.” 

The older man gazed at them for a moment more before giving each of them a curt nod. Then he turned abruptly and began to slog through the cotton field towards the village. They stood and watched him for what seemed like a short eternity. He did not look back. 

“I hope you are not seriously expecting me to go swimming with you, English.”

“Of course not,” Xander answered as he began to rummage through his toolbox. Eshu frowned and wondered exactly what that little comment was supposed to mean. “Though you might want to stick around for the floor show,” the man suggested as he removed a heavy, flat-bladed screwdriver from the box. He rose, favoring the Orisha with an almost predatory smile. “Could get interesting,” he added as he tucked the tool into his pants at the small of his back before vaulting his little wall. Eshu stood for a few long moments and followed Xander’s progress around to the far side of the lagoon with his eyes before doing it with his feet. 

By the time Eshu was making himself at home in the shadows of a mangrove tree, Xander had removed his soaked boots and water-logged socks. As he watched, the man began to slowly unbutton and remove his shirt in what was a surprisingly sexy manner. Just as he flung the shirt away with a twirl of his arm and a thrust of his hips, a head appeared above the water in the center of the lagoon. Xander unzipped his jeans and slid his hands under them, but made no move to actually take them off. The far-off head swam rapidly forward and became the upper-body of a well-endowed, finely sculpted woman. 

“Come to me, lover,” she called in the native Fon dialect and beckoned seductively. “The water’s fine.”

Xander made his way down the bank and stopped with his feet underwater. “Why, Grandma,” he returned in English in a similarly flirtations manner. “What big...eyes you have.” Line delivered, he waded out to waist depth and no farther. From his position under the trees, Eshu watched as the man fished the screwdriver out of his pants and held it flat against his arm.

A flicker of bemusement flashed across the demon-woman’s face, but she then smiled invitingly and made her way closer to him and the shore. “Come, lover,” she purred. “Come closer.”

Xander seemed to hesitate before heading out to meet her and Eshu found himself wishing he could see his friend’s face or at least smoke a cigarette. The demoness seemed to have decided to meet him part way and her steady stream of seductive encouragement drifted back across the water as they moved towards each other. They halted face to face somewhere in the shallows at chest height. The demon-woman spread her arms wide. “Come,” she cried as though in the throes of passion. “Enjoy this last embrace.”

“Sorry, baby,” Xander replied not sounding apologetic in the least. “Trying to break the demon dating habit,” he explained before driving the screwdriver into her left eye. The demon shrieked and oozed iridescent green as the man wrenched his weapon for another try. 

He did not get one. With an almost casual sweep of her apparently claw-tipped hand she made Xander yip in pain as the screwdriver flew from his grip. She seized him in that last embrace she had mentioned and pulled him beneath the surface. The water began to boil and the steady rain became a driving downpour as thunder rolled in the clouds overhead. Eshu abandoned the shelter of the mangrove and ambled to the water’s edge. There he stopped and forced himself to watch as the water churned and the occasional limb made it briefly to air before being dragged back under. He would not go in. Xander was just a mortal after all. Eshu opened doors and cleared thresholds, but they were for mortals to enter and cross, not him. 

The water’s surface smoothed and Eshu turned to go. A gasp behind him had him whirling back. There was Xander, chest heaving. He was covered in scratches but otherwise whole and clutching the screwdriver. “I thought you drowned,” the Orisha called out to the man.

Xander shook his head and grinned. “Fish... genes,” he gasped. “Never calling Coach Marin psycho again.” He made his way to shore fumbling with the zipper on his pants as the rain eased from a drenching downpour back to just steady. Xander slogged up out of the shallows and sat down by his boots. He laid down the screwdriver as he did up the laces. The blade of it was clean, but the wooden handle was stained bright green in places. The steady rain was dwindling to a sprinkle as Eshu stared at the tool-cum-weapon. He turned away and picked up Xander’s shirt. 

"Thanks,” Xander said as he put it on and stood up. “Is it my imagination,” the man began, “or has the rain stopped?” They tipped their faces to the dark and dry sky. 

“Good thing, too. Now I can light my cigarette.”


End file.
